- From: Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com>
- Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:24:02 -0700
- To: Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com>
- CC: ifette@google.com, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>, James Hawkins <jhawkins@google.com>, public-webapps@w3.org
On 9/20/2011 10:27 AM, Marcos Caceres wrote: > On Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote: >> While issuing a ton of patent exclusions for something like this would be rather poor, I would frankly rather have that then a spec that doesn't get any attention from a party that's clearly relevant only to have patents come up /after/ the spec is published and implemented. > Agreed, but for that we need to go through rechartering this group to include the new deliverable (i.e., to give everyone a fair chance to say if they are willing to give up their IPR around this). I think your concerns are fair. While all that gets worked out, it'd be great to have active participation on public-webapps from Microsoft and occasional input from the HTML5 Editor and assistant. I'd like to see navigator.registerContentHandler integrated into Web Intents. window.navigator.startActivity seems like a solid addition to HTML5 NavigatorContentUtils. There is some overlap with File API FileSaver. I understand that Web Intents has been in development for some time: I'd like to deconstruct and reconstruct the components to get a clear idea of side effects. Web Intents proposes three items: registration, invocation and schema URLs. Invocation: Invocation seems straightforward with startActivity. We could use FileSaver, but MIME does not have the added "schema URL" semantic that Intents adds. Example: var intent = new Intent("http://webintents.org/share", "text/uri-list", "http://news.bbc.co.uk"); var saver = new FileSaver(blob, "filename.ext"); FileSaver requires blob encapsulation. Blob encapsulation is a bit of extra-work when working with array buffers, and strings, and the like. FileSaver Progress events are handy: http://www.w3.org/TR/file-writer-api/#the-filesaver-interface Schema URLs: Web Intents proposes a new "type" of information, an intent keyword, essentially. There are a handful of common intents defined in the proposal, all of them prefixed with "http://webintents.org/". I'd like to see that prefix stripped. Given that Web Intents -is- defining the standard, I do not see a good reason for the extra baggage. I'd prefer keyword | uri as option, instead of just URI. Thus: var intent = new Intent('share', 'text/uri-list', 'http://w3c.org'); // Much shorter. Intents does seem to be something that can work for RPC, in addition to current HTTP headers. I could easily see this working across web sockets as well as it works through intra-browser postMessage. A "Web-Intent" HTTP header might prove valuable. A URL might register itself to accept POST and Web Sockets submissions. Consider a header of: Web-Intent: share A supporting server could then process that data server-side. Registration: Register Content/Protocol Handler: Google has limited support for these APIs, protocol handlers, prefixed with "web+" are rarely used. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/timers.html#custom-handlers http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11359 Web Intents-style is easy to understand, and seems to be more of a priority: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90458 http://code.google.com/apis/picker/docs/ Mozilla proposes registration in application manifest files: https://github.com/mozilla/openwebapps/blob/master/docs/ACTIVITIES.md Google has a registration technique for Chrome OS, for handling file types by file extension. It is limited to packaged, locally installed applications. http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/fileBrowserHandler.html Permissions: Mozilla has expressed concerns about registerPermission APIs, having used a synchronous variant for extensions. http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/perms/FeaturePermissions.html TL;DR: FileSaver and Intent have very similar use cases -- it's quite reasonable that a FileSaver would run an Intent session on the UA, allowing a user to "save" their file to various registered targets. Look for harmony. Intent schema URLs seem fine, but there's no reason to have "http://webintents.org/" as a standard prefix, strip the prefix there. Consider HTTP 1.0/Web Sockets support, as an addition to the scope. Registration is tricky. Manifest files seem like a solid place to start. registerHandler seems like a good addition to registerContentHandler and registerProtocolHandler.
Received on Thursday, 22 September 2011 16:24:34 UTC